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Cait Sidhe
The Cait Sidhe are cat shapeshifters. They are ruled by no court but their own after petitioning Oberon for independence.http://seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com/320961.html''[[Rosemary and Rue]], ch. 10 They control the forgotten places and walk the shadows. The Cait Sidhe live in loose alliances called Courts, which each answer to a single King or Queen. The rulers ascend by a trial of combat. Royal cats are rare enough that royal kittens are asked to join many courts. Individually, the Cait Sidhe take the form of any type of cat. Though personalities vary, they are always smug, aloof, and dangerous. They take lovers only infrequently and generally do not remain with them.Rosemary and Rue, ch. 16 Kittens, even changeling kittens, are highly valued. In Toby's world, strays and housecats are often Cait Sidhe. Cait Sidhe Characters For a list of Cait Sidhe characters, see Court of Cats. Other Details ✥ Their rites of ascension are all barbarous and bloody—a royal kitten is not considered worthy for ascension if they can't hold their own in a fight. The entire Cait Sidhe population have smugness as a racial trait, at least this is what Toby thinks when she meets Raj. It might have something to do with them being specifically outside of the political structure that strangles Faerie. There is nothing the royals can actually do to the Cait Sidhe and they are well aware of this detail. "A Cat can look at a king," after all. ~ Literature/October Daye - Television Tropes & Idioms Most Cait Sidhe can access the Shadow Roads, cast illusions, and change forms...but not all of them. Some Cait Sidhe are always bipedal, or always cats. Some Cait Sidhe have tails in their human forms, or no tails in their cat forms. And so it goes. * Faerie superstition goes that, so long as a cat exists, the memory of the fae will go on. * The Shadow Roads answer only to them, although others may be able to use them.Jealous in Honor * They can see through illusions (often unintentionally), particularly in cat form.Jealous in Honor Traditional greetings among the Cait Sidhe are ‘kind fires and good hunting,’ or ‘warm shadows and open doors.’In Deepest Consequence History of the Cait Sidhe "...we had begun with three Firstborn. Erda, Jibvel, and Malvic, our Queen, Prince, and King, respectively, who had chosen to unite their Courts into a single empire rather than holding them apart. ''Erda, who had been the first to anchor the Shadow Roads, and without whose blood we would be unable to reach them. (Erda is associated with Titania.) Malvic, who had called the lost places to him almost without thinking, and whose contribution to our kind rendered the Court of Cats secure. Jibvel, third and last-born of the three, who had been able to see through illusions from the time of his birth, and who had gifted that ability to his descendants, and with time, to the whole of the Court." Cait Sidhe in Mythology The Cait Sidhe is a fairy creature from Celtic mythology, said to resemble a large black cat with a white spot on its breast, as large as a dog, with an arched back. There were many beliefs about the Cait Sidhe, few of them good. Some believed that it could steal a person's soul before it was claimed by the Gods by passing over a corpse before burial; therefore watches called the Feill Fadalach (Late Wake) were performed night and day to keep the Cat Sìth away from a corpse before burial.MacGillivray, Deborah. "The Cait Sidhe". Methods of "distraction" such as games of leaping and wrestling, catnip, riddles, and music would be employed to keep the Cat Sìth away from the room in which the corpse lay. In addition, there were no fires where the body lay, as it was legend that the Cat Sìth was attracted to the warmth. Some people believed that the Cat Sìth was a witch that could transform voluntarily into its cat form and back eight times. If one of these witches chose to go back into their cat form for the ninth time, they would remain a cat for the rest of their lives. It is believed by some that this is how the idea of a cat having nine lives originated. On Samhain, it was believed that a Cat Sìth would bless any house that left a saucer of milk out for it to drink, but those houses that did not let out a saucer of milk would be cursed into having all of their cows' milk dry. Book References External References *Cat sìth - Wikipedia *Cats in History: Celtic Folklore - Playful Kitty See Also * List of Fae Types * Cu Sidhe Category:Types of fae